Clients

Concordia University

Client Profile

Concordia University is welcoming, engaged, and committed to innovation and excellence ineducation, research, creative activity and community partnerships. It dares to be different and draws on its diversity to transform the individual, strengthen society and enrich the world. The University Communication Services Department is the primary user of Easy Projects. The department includes 60 employees who use EP on a daily basis to manage PR, media relations, web support and marketing projects. There are also an additional 40 employees who represent various departments that submit requests to the communication team.

The Challenge

Previously, the Department was using a custom solution called Filemaker Pro for task and project management. However, as the team grew, they discovered that it was not able to meet all of their needs. Customization and assigning tasks on this system was not possible. The department had to print out tasks and physically hand them out to staff making it difficult to track all of the paper. As a public institution, the University is obliged to archive every single piece of communication. Every year, the department would archive thousands of printed files.

The executive director decided that it was time to find a solution that would be able to scale and allow for more flexibility and more organization.

The department’s requirements were:

A tool that is collaborative;

Easy to adapt and scale across the organization;

Allow for accurate and sustainable record keeping;

Provide a traceable workflow;

Flexible and customizable;

Something that could be hosted on Concordia’s Server.

The Implementation

After reviewing five project management platforms, the Department decided on Easy Projects as the final choice. Once implemented, Easy Projects made a positive impact on the departments’ workflow. Custom forms was one of the crucial features for the department helping save time and energy. It is used to handle incoming requests from other departments within the university. It is now mandatory that all requests be sent through custom forms that were designed within Easy Projects. As they worked with Easy Projects, they discovered that some unique requirements were needed for the sake of efficiency. The development team at Easy Projects stepped in to customize the experience.

Some of the features that were created include:

Specific workload specifications depending on how many people were involved in a project;

The Outcome

Having implemented Easy Projects, the team at Concordia ended up with many positive outcomes:

A sustainable, paperless, office environment;

Better collaboration between team members;

Ability to take requests from other departments seamlessly;

Ability plan and predict resources availability;

24,000 + hours saved per year.

“Aside from the time-saving aspect, I think it’s having everything in one place, to make sure that bits of paper don’t get lost, emails don’t get deleted, well, stuff gets deleted out of EP as well, but really not the way an email can slip through the cracks, right? It made the workflow more efficient. The end result is that we’re actually making more stuff done instead of less.”

Easy Projects is helping the Concordia Communication Services team become more efficient and effective and has made the department a buzzing centre of productivity.